He wrote two novels during Alice ’s stay in England, which were saturated with the peculiar atmosphere of his sister’s world. He understood the dilemma of a woman in an age of reform pulled between the rules of her upbringing and the need to change those rules, but also, and, he thought, more crucially, the dilemma of a woman brought up in a free-thinking family which confined its free thought to conversation and remained respectable and conformist in every other way. When he came to write The Bostonians he had no difficulty imagining the conflict between two people who seek power over a third. Such a struggle had occurred briefly between him and Miss Loring until he had abandoned it and left the field to her. In the other novel, The Princess Casamassima, also written after Alice ’s arrival in England, he wrote, at first without realizing, a double portrait of her. In one half she was the princess herself, subtle, brilliant and darkly powerful, recently arrived in London. The other half she must have recognized: she was Rosy Munniment, confined to her bed, ‘a strange bedizened little invalid’, a ‘small, old, sharp, crippled, chattering sister’, a ‘hard, bright creature, polished, as it were, by pain’.
She read all his work, and expressed her great admiration for this new novel without mentioning the bedridden sister who is much disliked by the two main characters. In her diary she wrote of Henry’s industry and William’s success. It was not, she wrote, a bad show for one family, especially, she added, if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all.
Thus, having moved to London, she began to die in earnest, she who had played at dying for so great a duration. She longed, she told Henry, for some palpable disease, and the arrival of her cancer she viewed with enormous relief. She was only forty-three. She dreamed she saw a boat being tossed on the sea, and passing under a great black cloud she saw her dead friend Annie Dixwell who had looked back at her. She was ready to go to her.
Henry and Miss Loring watched over her as she weakened, her pain kept at bay by morphine. She seemed not to change at all and he wondered if she might slip away like this; die, as it were, without noticing. But her dying was not easy.
One day he came into her room and was startled by the change in her. She was in distress, breathing with difficulty, and her pulse, Miss Loring said, was weak and erratic. A fever had made her quiet, but at intervals a hard cough began until she retched and retched and then lay back exhausted. When she tried to speak, the cough returned and shook her to pieces, and then she became silent. The doctor said that there was no reason why she could not go on like this for days.
He watched her, desperate to offer any comfort. He was frightened for her, and believed that, despite everything she had said, she was frightened too. At every moment he expected she would go, and he waited knowing that she would need to say one last thing before sinking into death.
And then another change came. In a few hours all the pain and discomfort seemed to cease, and all the coughing and even the fever abated, and the deathly look on her face took on a new intensity. She did not sleep. As he sat close to her, he wished his mother were here to talk to her now with words which would help her to let go, to ease herself out of the world. He tried to picture his mother in the room, he almost whispered to her to come now into the room, hover here, mother, help Alice with your tenderness. He wanted to ask his sister if she could feel their mother’s spirit in the room.
It was clear that she would not last, yet Katherine Loring insisted that he not stay into the small hours and he agreed that there was nothing he could do. He prepared to leave. But before he did he saw her becoming restless again, unable to turn in the bed and struggling to breathe. And then she whispered and both he and Miss Loring looked at each other sharply. Slowly, with effort, Alice raised her voice so that they could now hear her clearly.
‘I cannot bear to live another day,’ she said. ‘I beg that it might not be asked of me.’
The words helped him as he walked slowly back through Kensington to his own chambers. He had always feared that when the end came for her it might be what she had dreaded most, that all her talk of wanting to die might turn out, in her last days, to have been mere bravado. He felt relieved that his sister had meant what she had said. He had watched her, knowing that in her place he would be terrified, but she was different. She did not flinch.
In the reaches of the night, Katherine Loring told him, she sank into a gentle sleep. As he began another day’s vigil by her bed, he wondered about her dreams and hoped that the morphine made them golden and took away all the darkness and fear that had clouded her life. He willed her to be happy now. But he could not stop himself wanting her to go on breathing, despite everything, not to let go. He could not imagine her dead, having watched her dying for so long. The doctor, when he arrived, asked leave not to treat her, as she was in need of no further medical assistance.
For Henry, now almost fifty, this was his first death. He had not been present when his mother died nor his father. He had sat by his mother’s dead body, but he had not witnessed her last breath. He had described dying in his books, but he had not known about this, the long day waiting as his sister’s breath grew shallow, then seemed to fade, then rose again. He tried to imagine what was happening to her consciousness, her great barbed wit, and he came to feel that all that was left of her was her fitful breath and her weakened pulse. There was no will and no knowledge, merely the body moving slowly towards its end. And this to him made her even more pitiful.
Always, he had the image of the house of death as a silent place, still and watchful, but now he knew that there was no silence in this house because the sound of his sister’s breathing, the changes in its levels of intensity, filled the air. Her pulse flickered and briefly stopped but still she did not die. He wondered if his mother’s death had been like this. Alice was the only one who would know, the only one he could have asked.
He stood up and touched her as her breathing became easy and regular, her sleep peaceful. And this lasted an hour. She was still not ready to go, and he wondered who she was now, what part of her existed in these last hours? As her breathing stopped, he watched in alarm. He was unprepared, despite those days and nights of vigil. She took another breath, laboured and shallow. He wished once more that his mother was here to sit by him, hold his hand as Alice finally slipped away. Miss Loring now began to time her breathing, just one breath every minute, she said. As the end came, Alice ’s face seemed clearer in a way that was strange and oddly touching. He stood up and went to the window to let in some light and when he came back to the bed she had drawn her last breath. The room was finally still.
He stayed by her body, knowing that lying peacefully in death was what she had craved to do. She looked beautiful and noble, and he believed, after all his earlier doubts, that if she could see herself as her body awaited cremation, she would feel a grim delight at what she had become. It meant a great deal to him that her ashes would be returned to America to rest beside her parents in the cemetery in Cambridge. It consoled him that they would not bury her in England, would not leave her far from home in the wintry earth.
Her dead face changed as the light changed. She seemed young and old, exhausted and quite utterly beautiful. He smiled at her as she lay still, her face pale and drawn, yet exquisite and fine. He remembered her anger at being left a life interest in a shawl and other worldly goods by her Aunt Kate. Both he and his sister would die childless; what they owned was theirs only while they lived. There would be no direct heirs. They had both recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love. They had never wanted it. He felt they had both been banished, sent into exile, left alone, while their siblings had married and their parents had followed one another into death. Sadly and tenderly, he touched her cold, composed hands.